Book Image

Learning Quantitative Finance with R

By : Dr. Param Jeet, PRASHANT VATS
Book Image

Learning Quantitative Finance with R

By: Dr. Param Jeet, PRASHANT VATS

Overview of this book

The role of a quantitative analyst is very challenging, yet lucrative, so there is a lot of competition for the role in top-tier organizations and investment banks. This book is your go-to resource if you want to equip yourself with the skills required to tackle any real-world problem in quantitative finance using the popular R programming language. You'll start by getting an understanding of the basics of R and its relevance in the field of quantitative finance. Once you've built this foundation, we'll dive into the practicalities of building financial models in R. This will help you have a fair understanding of the topics as well as their implementation, as the authors have presented some use cases along with examples that are easy to understand and correlate. We'll also look at risk management and optimization techniques for algorithmic trading. Finally, the book will explain some advanced concepts, such as trading using machine learning, optimizations, exotic options, and hedging. By the end of this book, you will have a firm grasp of the techniques required to implement basic quantitative finance models in R.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning Quantitative Finance with R
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Probability distributions


Probability distributions determine how the values of random variables are spread. For example, the set of all the possible outcomes of the tossing of a sequence of coins gives rise to binomial distribution. The means of large samples of the data population follow normal distribution, which is the most common and useful distribution.

The features of these distributions are very well known and can be used to extract inferences about the population. We are going to discuss in this chapter some of the most common probability distributions and how to compute them.

Normal distribution

Normal distribution is the most widely used probability distribution in the financial industry. It is a bell-shaped curve and mean, median mode is the same for normal distribution. It is denoted by  where  is the mean and  is the variance of the sample. If the mean is 0 and variance is 1 then the normal distribution is known as standard normal distribution N(1, 0).

Now let us discuss the main...